Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Facebook just had their annual developers' conference and announced a few interesting changes to their empire.  The New York Times reported on a few of these that are especially interesting - Facebook Connect and the Great Apps program.

Facebook Connect makes Facebook users' credentials and their friends portable.  This is pretty powerful in that it allows small companies and opportunity to develop services external to the Facebook domain that take advantage of the fairly significant existing user base (and their networks).  So it's advantageous to independent developers and as such should spur more innovation, and probably more meaningless clutter as well.  It's advantageous to Facebook as they can start to open up the walled garden in a very controlled way. 

As for the user themselves? Well, in some ways it's a step in the right direction. On the other hand it doesn't go the complete distance that adopting OpenID would in giving users ownership of their social graph.  At the end of the day it's all about balancing user needs against business needs and this will continue to be a work in progress for anyone trying to drive profit from social networking.

On the other side of the coin, Facebook also announced the "Great Apps" program - essentially a certification program designed to elevate 'meaningful' applications up out of the vast sea of mediocrity that makes up the Facebook application collection. Obviously not their words. 

Anyway, there's obviously a ton of completely useless Facebook apps out there and as a result a continually increasing likliehood of application burn-out and backlash.  There are ways to filter, but some sort of "seal of approval" isn't a bad idea, provided the results resonate with the user base.

The nice thing is that, in theory, the "Great Apps" won't be limited to the big players.  Applications will be considered when they exemplify all ten of Facebook's guiding principles for a social application.  These principles are actually a pretty good representation of best practices for creating a successful social networking marketing program.  At the end of the day, how well something exemplifies the ten principles is probably quite subjective.  But gaining "Great Apps" status seems like a worthwhile bonus metric.  At the very least, making an honest effort to exceed the criteria for each principle can only benefit the program.

The principle I think many marketing-born apps miss out on is "useful" - although Facebook includes "entertainment" in that category, kind of a big loophole and likely to be one many gravitate towards.  And I'd add something that seems missing from Facebook's ten principles - creating a "find".  iLike, one of the first Great App selections, does meet Facebook's ten principles as well as providing an engine for one of the classic "finds"- new music. Users can share music they've discovered and ideally garner appreciation.  Maybe that's covered by Facebook's "useful" principle, but worth explicitly keeping in mind IMHO. 

David Lewis